Balakrishnan
Biographic Data
| ID | 156269 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Balakrishnan |
| FAMILY NAME | Balakrishnan |
| SIGNATURE | BALAKRISHNAN |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1279-8497 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Somaesthetics of Bharatanāṭyam
This interview contains insights into the journey of an artist as a practitioner, and a performer of the Indian classical dance Bharatanāṭyam. Discussing the philosophical, spiritual and somatic dimensions of the dance, the artist elaborates on the role of the performing soma as the medium of communication in the classical dance form, and the importance of practice in preparing the soma for the effective embodiment of emotions.Smt. Vrinda Ramanan…
Draped Identities
Somaesthetics and Dance
This paper performs a Somaesthetic evaluation of Kundalini Pattu: A Dance-Yoga, a dance performance portraying the spirit of Kundalini as creation of life and life forces after death. The discussion laid out in three sections uses Shusterman’s philosophy of Analytic, Pragmatic and Practical somaesthetics to evaluate the two performances of this choreography, one featuring Guru Reshmi Narayanan and the other her students. The study attempts to est…
Situating the intersectional lives of the reformers
The study examines the inclusive educational practices in Kerala during the Reformation era (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) in order to position intersectionality as a heuristic device to study childhood and education in Kerala. The intersectional approach is an efficient tool to analyse the situatedness of the reformers like Ayyankali, Mariamma and Arya Pallam who led social movements towards the realisation of equitable education in Kerala…
Representing the unrepresented
Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri Lankan Conflict (2019), is an ethnographic novel about the Sri Lankan civilians who were caught between the army and the LTTE during the final months of the Civil War. The novel is read in the light of Butler’s concepts of precarity, grievability and alternate frames to demonstrate how the affordances of the graphic novel negotiate the representation of trauma, loss and vulnerability of refugeehood, in o…
Representation of Native Crowd in Alice Perrin’s Short Stories
The paper locates Alice Perrin’s short stories within the historical and literary contexts of the British Raj period and examines the representation of native crowds in order to understand India as a site of Anglo-Indian anxieties even during the period of “high imperialism” of the British Raj. Investigating her stories through the lens of the pragmatic theories of Elias Canetti, Le Bon Gustave, William Reddy, and Ann Laura Stoler, the paper demo…
Performing Offense
Offense lurks behind the political cartoon like its shadow, capable of creating mixed reactions in the target. In terms of offense-giving, cartoonists are sometimes cautious and at other times cavalier, thereby causing intentional and inadvertent offense, respectively. This article examines the aspects of the political cartoon that facilitate the performance of offense, which is predominantly visual in nature. The article takes the position that …
Laughing Online
This paper investigates spectator dynamics in the offline and online performances of stand-up comedians, Vir Das and Kenny Sebastian. It studies the performer–comedian relationship through the media theory of John Fiske and John Hartley, the Rasa Box of Richard Schechner and Group Phenomenon of psychology. Media and performance aspects, such as stage setting, lighting, script, identity, complaisance and techniques, are theorised to arrive at insi…
The Burmese Refugee Exodus of 1942
The Burmese Refugee Exodus of 1942 was one of the worst forced migrations in South Asia. The capture of Burma by the Japanese during the Second World War forced the British to retreat and the occupants to flee as refugees to India. Despite its magnitude and impact, it remains largely understudied by both historians and scholars. The few records that exist are largely Eurocentric and reduce the Indian refugees to a nameless, faceless mass of trave…
Theorizing Language Evolution Using NCT and Conlangs
An extensive amount of scholarly work has displaced traditional and positivist assumptions of the separation of the cognitive and cultural domains as two separate entities. Notably, the interventions of scholars prominent in linguistics, and hence those such as Bouchard, Arbib, and Odling-Smee, have effectively positioned or displaced this older and more archaic thinking. In this paper, we posit that the propensity for constructivism in human lan…
Before the political cartoonist, there was the Vidusaka
Political cartooning was one among the many cultural products that colonial rule introduced in India. This British legacy has been used to produce narratives about the nature and history of Indian cartooning. However, these narratives have, invariably, overlooked the distinctly Indian cultural ethos as well as the Indian satirical tradition. The paper proposes an alternative model by positing that in the Indian satirical tradition, the Vidusaka –…
Subnational Discourse as Counter Imagination in Esther Syiem's "To the Rest of India from Another Indian"
This paper posits that Esther Syiem's poem, "To the Rest of India from Another Indian" (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways—foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its i…
Positioning the Gendered Subaltern
The postcolonial theory locates subaltern women as ‘doubly effaced’ and distanced from achieving agency to speak and participate in resistance. Due to her diversified colonized identity, much of the critical thought does not see any possibility for subaltern women participating in resistance. This line of argument implies a critical space in which the engagement with problematics inevitably leaves out subaltern women in the emergent resistance di…
Theorizing the Experience of Travel in the Film North 24 Kaatham
There are two spaces in Anil Radhakrishnan's travel narrative, North 24 Kaatham (2013), the topographical space outside and the psychological space inside. The film is read as a dialectical tension that plays out in the character of Harikrishnan who suffers from an obsessive compulsive disorder. The fateful journey of Harikrishnan on a day of harthal (general strike) is, to all appearance, topographical though it is, in equal measure, a psycholog…
The Sculptor and the Professor
A paradigm shift has happened in the relationship between the spectator and the woman-on-the-screen. The shift from an analogue to a digital era implies that the dynamics of objectification have also shifted irrevocably. The two ages of voyeurism are characterized, respectively, through Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014). The paper reads that the voyeur in the analogue frame of Rear Window (Jeff) is in a metaphori…
Bharatamuni’s hāsya in Nāṭya Śāstra and Bergson’s Laughter
The paper elucidates the “paradox of comedy”—a perpetual philosophical concern regarding the nature of theatrical/stage comedy—through a cross-cultural comparison between Bharatamuni’s (circa 500 A.D.) and Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) theorization of the comic and thereupon, fathoms the Indian comic tradition in the canon of comedy studies. Bharata’s hāsya in Nāṭya Śāstra and Bergson’s Laughter become tenable for a comparative aesthetic study as t…
Virality in the environment of political cartoons
The context for the paper is the inclusion of a 64-year old cartoon in the Political Science textbook that caused an uproar in the Indian parliament in 2012. The controversy draws attention to the two-facedness of any political cartoon which is an artistic representation of a historical event. It is, hence, ambivalent by being an expression of artistic freedom as well as a humorous comment on history where the axis of representation intersects th…
Registering the Self and the Registers of Self
This article proposes a model for the subject-collaborator relationship in which Donna Haraway’s diffraction and mutated modest witness are posited as the new registers of collaborative self-formation. The article examines situated ethics in the collaborative autobiographies of Nalini Jameela and Mayilamma
Being Bios in Zoe and Zoe in Bios
Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood is a proposer of unexamined possibilities in Agamben that relates to the location of the human in modern democracies. Joining issue with Agamben about the constitution of modern man as the paradox of bios/zoe, this paper alludes to thick situations in the novel to establish that a person can exist as pure bios by surpassing de-politicization, and they also might deteriorate into pure zoe irrespective of the guaran…
Historicising the Banal
This paper examines media representation and its role in manifesting a banal rhetoric that compels a subnational discourse to emerge from the quotidian. The everyday discrimination experienced by the people of India’s North-East, who migrate and live in the metropolitan cities of India, exacerbates a rupture with the sign of national pedagogy, the constitution. The national discourse simultaneously appropriates these banal fractures, rendering th…
Between Mental Manufacture and Pure Transcript
Sri Aurobindo’s multifaceted engagements will continue to occupy scholars in different fields. As one who belongs to a country that has begotten eminent theoreticians in the fields of literature, arts, linguistics, and aesthetics, Sri Aurobindo’s contribution deserves a dispassionate assessment. Volume 27 of the Complete Works contains his “Letters on Poetry and Art” which can be examined for the potential for a theory of poetry. As letters, they…
Genetic differentiation among endogamous Brahmin subsects of Andhra Pradesh, India
Mannathu Padmanabhan and the Revival of Nairs in Kerala
A preliminary study of genetic distances among some populations of the Indian sub-continent
Genetic Diversity Among Australian Aborigines
Genetic Diversity Among Australian Aborigines
The Sculptor and the Professor
A paradigm shift has happened in the relationship between the spectator and the woman-on-the-screen. The shift from an analogue to a digital era implies that the dynamics of objectification have also shifted irrevocably. The two ages of voyeurism are characterized, respectively, through Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014). The paper reads that the voyeur in the analogue frame of Rear Window (Jeff) is in a metaphori…
Bharatamuni’s hāsya in Nāṭya Śāstra and Bergson’s Laughter
The paper elucidates the “paradox of comedy”—a perpetual philosophical concern regarding the nature of theatrical/stage comedy—through a cross-cultural comparison between Bharatamuni’s (circa 500 A.D.) and Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) theorization of the comic and thereupon, fathoms the Indian comic tradition in the canon of comedy studies. Bharata’s hāsya in Nāṭya Śāstra and Bergson’s Laughter become tenable for a comparative aesthetic study as t…
A preliminary study of genetic distances among some populations of the Indian sub-continent
Genetic Diversity Among Australian Aborigines
A preliminary study of genetic distances among some populations of the Indian sub-continent
Mannathu Padmanabhan and the Revival of Nairs in Kerala
Genetic differentiation among endogamous Brahmin subsects of Andhra Pradesh, India
Between Mental Manufacture and Pure Transcript
Sri Aurobindo’s multifaceted engagements will continue to occupy scholars in different fields. As one who belongs to a country that has begotten eminent theoreticians in the fields of literature, arts, linguistics, and aesthetics, Sri Aurobindo’s contribution deserves a dispassionate assessment. Volume 27 of the Complete Works contains his “Letters on Poetry and Art” which can be examined for the potential for a theory of poetry. As letters, they…
Historicising the Banal
This paper examines media representation and its role in manifesting a banal rhetoric that compels a subnational discourse to emerge from the quotidian. The everyday discrimination experienced by the people of India’s North-East, who migrate and live in the metropolitan cities of India, exacerbates a rupture with the sign of national pedagogy, the constitution. The national discourse simultaneously appropriates these banal fractures, rendering th…
Virality in the environment of political cartoons
The context for the paper is the inclusion of a 64-year old cartoon in the Political Science textbook that caused an uproar in the Indian parliament in 2012. The controversy draws attention to the two-facedness of any political cartoon which is an artistic representation of a historical event. It is, hence, ambivalent by being an expression of artistic freedom as well as a humorous comment on history where the axis of representation intersects th…
Registering the Self and the Registers of Self
This article proposes a model for the subject-collaborator relationship in which Donna Haraway’s diffraction and mutated modest witness are posited as the new registers of collaborative self-formation. The article examines situated ethics in the collaborative autobiographies of Nalini Jameela and Mayilamma
Being Bios in Zoe and Zoe in Bios
Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood is a proposer of unexamined possibilities in Agamben that relates to the location of the human in modern democracies. Joining issue with Agamben about the constitution of modern man as the paradox of bios/zoe, this paper alludes to thick situations in the novel to establish that a person can exist as pure bios by surpassing de-politicization, and they also might deteriorate into pure zoe irrespective of the guaran…
Subnational Discourse as Counter Imagination in Esther Syiem's "To the Rest of India from Another Indian"
This paper posits that Esther Syiem's poem, "To the Rest of India from Another Indian" (2013) engenders a subnational discourse that, by interrogating the national status of a privileged pedagogy, opts for a confederal political imagination of multiple and equal centers. It fosters this desire by modulating a counter imagination in two strategic ways—foregroundong its strangeness and implanting its own subnational pedagogy which constitutes its i…
Positioning the Gendered Subaltern
The postcolonial theory locates subaltern women as ‘doubly effaced’ and distanced from achieving agency to speak and participate in resistance. Due to her diversified colonized identity, much of the critical thought does not see any possibility for subaltern women participating in resistance. This line of argument implies a critical space in which the engagement with problematics inevitably leaves out subaltern women in the emergent resistance di…
Theorizing the Experience of Travel in the Film North 24 Kaatham
There are two spaces in Anil Radhakrishnan's travel narrative, North 24 Kaatham (2013), the topographical space outside and the psychological space inside. The film is read as a dialectical tension that plays out in the character of Harikrishnan who suffers from an obsessive compulsive disorder. The fateful journey of Harikrishnan on a day of harthal (general strike) is, to all appearance, topographical though it is, in equal measure, a psycholog…
The Sculptor and the Professor
A paradigm shift has happened in the relationship between the spectator and the woman-on-the-screen. The shift from an analogue to a digital era implies that the dynamics of objectification have also shifted irrevocably. The two ages of voyeurism are characterized, respectively, through Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014). The paper reads that the voyeur in the analogue frame of Rear Window (Jeff) is in a metaphori…
Bharatamuni’s hāsya in Nāṭya Śāstra and Bergson’s Laughter
The paper elucidates the “paradox of comedy”—a perpetual philosophical concern regarding the nature of theatrical/stage comedy—through a cross-cultural comparison between Bharatamuni’s (circa 500 A.D.) and Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) theorization of the comic and thereupon, fathoms the Indian comic tradition in the canon of comedy studies. Bharata’s hāsya in Nāṭya Śāstra and Bergson’s Laughter become tenable for a comparative aesthetic study as t…
Before the political cartoonist, there was the Vidusaka
Political cartooning was one among the many cultural products that colonial rule introduced in India. This British legacy has been used to produce narratives about the nature and history of Indian cartooning. However, these narratives have, invariably, overlooked the distinctly Indian cultural ethos as well as the Indian satirical tradition. The paper proposes an alternative model by positing that in the Indian satirical tradition, the Vidusaka –…
Theorizing Language Evolution Using NCT and Conlangs
An extensive amount of scholarly work has displaced traditional and positivist assumptions of the separation of the cognitive and cultural domains as two separate entities. Notably, the interventions of scholars prominent in linguistics, and hence those such as Bouchard, Arbib, and Odling-Smee, have effectively positioned or displaced this older and more archaic thinking. In this paper, we posit that the propensity for constructivism in human lan…
Performing Offense
Offense lurks behind the political cartoon like its shadow, capable of creating mixed reactions in the target. In terms of offense-giving, cartoonists are sometimes cautious and at other times cavalier, thereby causing intentional and inadvertent offense, respectively. This article examines the aspects of the political cartoon that facilitate the performance of offense, which is predominantly visual in nature. The article takes the position that …
Laughing Online
This paper investigates spectator dynamics in the offline and online performances of stand-up comedians, Vir Das and Kenny Sebastian. It studies the performer–comedian relationship through the media theory of John Fiske and John Hartley, the Rasa Box of Richard Schechner and Group Phenomenon of psychology. Media and performance aspects, such as stage setting, lighting, script, identity, complaisance and techniques, are theorised to arrive at insi…
The Burmese Refugee Exodus of 1942
The Burmese Refugee Exodus of 1942 was one of the worst forced migrations in South Asia. The capture of Burma by the Japanese during the Second World War forced the British to retreat and the occupants to flee as refugees to India. Despite its magnitude and impact, it remains largely understudied by both historians and scholars. The few records that exist are largely Eurocentric and reduce the Indian refugees to a nameless, faceless mass of trave…
Representing the unrepresented
Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri Lankan Conflict (2019), is an ethnographic novel about the Sri Lankan civilians who were caught between the army and the LTTE during the final months of the Civil War. The novel is read in the light of Butler’s concepts of precarity, grievability and alternate frames to demonstrate how the affordances of the graphic novel negotiate the representation of trauma, loss and vulnerability of refugeehood, in o…
Representation of Native Crowd in Alice Perrin’s Short Stories
The paper locates Alice Perrin’s short stories within the historical and literary contexts of the British Raj period and examines the representation of native crowds in order to understand India as a site of Anglo-Indian anxieties even during the period of “high imperialism” of the British Raj. Investigating her stories through the lens of the pragmatic theories of Elias Canetti, Le Bon Gustave, William Reddy, and Ann Laura Stoler, the paper demo…
Somaesthetics and Dance
This paper performs a Somaesthetic evaluation of Kundalini Pattu: A Dance-Yoga, a dance performance portraying the spirit of Kundalini as creation of life and life forces after death. The discussion laid out in three sections uses Shusterman’s philosophy of Analytic, Pragmatic and Practical somaesthetics to evaluate the two performances of this choreography, one featuring Guru Reshmi Narayanan and the other her students. The study attempts to est…
Situating the intersectional lives of the reformers
The study examines the inclusive educational practices in Kerala during the Reformation era (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) in order to position intersectionality as a heuristic device to study childhood and education in Kerala. The intersectional approach is an efficient tool to analyse the situatedness of the reformers like Ayyankali, Mariamma and Arya Pallam who led social movements towards the realisation of equitable education in Kerala…
Somaesthetics of Bharatanāṭyam
This interview contains insights into the journey of an artist as a practitioner, and a performer of the Indian classical dance Bharatanāṭyam. Discussing the philosophical, spiritual and somatic dimensions of the dance, the artist elaborates on the role of the performing soma as the medium of communication in the classical dance form, and the importance of practice in preparing the soma for the effective embodiment of emotions.Smt. Vrinda Ramanan…
Draped Identities
Art (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Literature (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · History (7 works)